Life as Crisis Management: The Labyrinth Books Kiada

 

I used to like Labyrinth Books, the Princeton, New Jersey shop that sells books both in their brick and mortar store and online. In fact, when I was in the City, which I was quite in the late nineties and early 2000s staying in a flat in Chelsea, I used to wonder up to their store near Columbia University. It was not the best used or new bookstore I have ever been in in the City, in North America, in Europe,  in Australia, or in New Zealand. But it was a decent a middling bookstore.

Then I got to know this firm. And familiarity, as the Chills note, sometimes definitely breeds, under the right empirical circumstances, contempt.

And the right empirical circumstances there have been. I have bought books online from Labyrinth on a couple of occasions. It went fine. Recently, however, I learned that if one bought over $100 dollars worth of books from them one received free shipping. So I dutifully put books in my shopping queue and eventually had enough books at the right cost to get the free shipping. So I ordered the items.

I got a communique from Labyrinth telling me the books had shipped. There was no indication that there was any change to my order so I rationally and reasonably assumed they were the books I ordered. When I got the books, however, the box was missing two items I had ordered and I quickly discovered that I had been charged around $9 dollars in shipping because, in a kind of capitalist catch-22, two of the items I ordered were out of stock. 

I contacted Labyrinth and asked why I was not contacted about this change in my order. They essentially implied that why should we? I responded with the logical riposte: because the order changed and as a consequence there was a change in the charges. Other bookstores, I noted, such as Midtown Scholar, a far superior bookshop to Labyrinth, for example, contacted me, as they should have, to note that a book described as “very good” was actually “good” and did I still want it at a discount? Given this, I responded by saying well then I will ship the books back and could they send me a pre-paid mailing label since it was their fault that the items were not in stock and their responsibility to let me know that the order had changed? They essentially told me tough luck kid. We don’t do that sort of thing here at King Labyrinth Books. They essentially, in doing this, told me that we are going to screw you not only once by by not telling you that there had been a change in the order and do you still want the books, twice by adding a shipping fee, and yet a third time by not paying themselves for a return of items I would never had chosen to receive if I knew a shipping charge would be added. Caveat emptor to the third power.

Since then I have asked them to refund me the shipping charge. It was their fault I was sent an order I no longer wanted, after all. They deigned not even to respond to such a plebeian request which, I presumed, meant a refusal even to consider such a thing. I then asked to delete my account. It took me three emails to finally get them to do this. Next, I asked them to take me off their mailing list. It took only one email to get them to do this. They also told me never to contact them again, which may have been due, in part, to the fact that I accurately described their firm as a skanky and slaggy con-corporation run by snake oil salesmen. The truth sometimes hurts, I guess, doesn’t it.

Postscript: As I suspected the Attorney General of New York, who I filed a formal complaint with about the immoral, never do the right thing, and hence skanky and slaggy corporation—skanky and slaggy being not slurs but empirical facts relating to this corporation and its skanky and slaggy behaviour— could do little to rectify the skanky and slaggy behaviour toward me of Labyrinth Books. The NYAG can only mediate. They suggested I take Labyrinth to small claims court, something I intend to look into. I intend to sue them for as much as I can for the emotional and financial damage this corporation has done to me, $400 or $500 dollars perhaps. I will also, of course, ask the court not only for shipping charges but also for time spent working on this issue at $50 to $75 dollars an hour—I reckon somewhere around $200 dollars total—and for court fees and costs.

On a sociological and ethnographic level what I find so interesting and fascinating is that used booksellers like Labyrinth, in the age of digital media and skanky and slaggy capitalism, have drunk deeply at the wells of conmen and snake oil salesman. Far too many used booksellers these days, for example, inadequately and inaccurately describe the used books they have for sale because, presumably, selling an item is more important to them than describing it accurately. Labyrinth is actually pretty good at describing what their used books actually look like (very good, good, acceptable). Where Labyrinth falls down is in what I described above. Apparently, because they want to sell books or need to sell books they don’t tell customers when an order has changed (in my case two books being out of stock) and they add monies to orders that no longer meet the minimum for the free shipping, something again they do not feel the need to tell the customer about (my case). Labyrinth has become unlike all the used bookstores I dealt with and worked for in the bad old stone age days before the internet and the worldwide web, skanky and slaggy. They have become, in other words, the mirror image of capitalist enterprises like those of Tanholio Trump. Welcome to the brave new world. Welcome to the best of all possible used bookstore worlds.